A group of World War II veterans and the National Park Service are in the middle of a nasty -- and a bit sad -- argument over San Francisco's most battle-scarred war memorial, the bridge of the cruiser San Francisco.

The memorial, which overlooks the Pacific at Land's End, the edge of the Golden Gate strait, is hallowed ground for war veterans: it consists of the top deck of the ship, where a Navy admiral was killed in battle at the moment of victory.

There are five big holes in the steel plating -- scars from what Fleet Adm. Ernest King called "one of the most furious sea battles ever fought." It happened during a night action against a powerful Japanese fleet near Guadalcanal, 60 years ago this fall.

The San Francisco was repaired and went back to the war, but the ruined bridge was saved as a memorial -- and now war veterans and a government agency are fighting over the future of this relic of the past. It is a battle over plaques and memories.

Just now, it appears that time has passed the memorial by. It was installed in 1950, when the memory of World War II was fresh. Now it looks neglected. The steel that took the Japanese shells is rusting, some of the nearby fencing has fallen down, the bronze tablets listing the names of the dead are tarnished, and the American flag no longer flies from the flagpole. Vandals stole it too often.

But the memorial has a powerful pull for those who served. "We left an awful lot of men out there, in those islands in the Pacific," said Johnny Johnson, 79, who sailed aboard the San Francisco throughout her World War II career.

There is general consensus that the memorial needs attention. the problem is who will do it and how.

Johnson and his friends in the USS San Francisco Association raised $60,000 for two plaques to be mounted near the base of the memorial, one showing the ship as she was in the war, the other telling her story: how the San Francisco was built in Mare Island, how she earned 30 battle stars, how Rear Adm. Daniel Callaghan and most of the other top officers were killed, how members of the ship's company earned four Medals of Honor.

The vets went ahead and commissioned the plaques, each 6 feet wide by 3 feet high. They are made of black granite. Together, they weigh nearly a ton.

However, the vets made what looks like a serious mistake: The memorial is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and they never got permission from the National Park Service to install the plaques on what is a national memorial.

Time was passing, the veterans say, and so were the veterans of the war. "The men who contributed to this would like to see it before they go," said Peter Hope, local public affairs director of the Naval Order of the United States, a group of naval historians, "and they are going every day."

The Park Service turned a dim eye on the plaques. First, installation of any plaque in a national park needs permission of the director of the Park Service in Washington, D.C.

Second, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area staff thought the plaques the veterans had in mind were not what the government had in mind. For one thing, the plaques could be easily vandalized. Park superintendent Brian O'Neill backed his staff.

Besides, O'Neill said, the park has other ideas for the site -- a different kind of sign, for one thing. And memorials, said O'Neill, are what the park service does best. The park service, he noted, supervises all the memorials in Washington from the Lincoln Memorial on down, the Civil War battlefields, and hundreds of other historic sites.

"We are the stewards and caretakers of the history of this country," he said.

Johnson and his veterans were outraged. "These people," he said, "have no feeling for the memory of this war."

The veterans and their friends accused O'Neill of giving them the runaround,

of not answering phone calls, of a lack of patriotism, of harboring secret plans to dismantle the San Francisco memorial and move it somewhere else, and, worse, of stall and delay. Hope calls it "bureaucratic constipation."

The result of this, so far, is more heat than light, with charges flying back and forth.

O'Neill says the park service has no intention of moving the memorial, but it also doesn't want to put up the plaques. What it wants, O'Neill says, is to properly interpret the site, to tell the story of the San Francisco and of the battle of Guadalcanal.

In end however, something may come of the dispute over the site. O'Neill says he wants to work something out, a compromise, perhaps. The park service, he says, "shares the passion" of the veterans for the site.